Antares overlooking an Auxiliary Telescope

Brilliant blue stars litter the southern sky and the galactic bulge of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, hangs serenely above the horizon in this spectacular shot of ESO’s Paranal Observatory.This image was taken atop Cerro Paranal in Chile, home to ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). In the foreground, the open dome of one of the four 1.8-metre Auxiliary Telescopes can be seen. The four Auxiliary Telescopes can be utilised together, to form the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI).

The plane of the Milky Way is dotted with bright regions of hot gas. The very bright star towards the upper left corner of the frame is Antares — the brightest star in Scorpius and the fifteenth brightest star in the night sky.

Text Credit:

ESO

Resources

Antares overlooking an Auxiliary Telescope

Small Asteroid or Comet 'Visits' from Beyond the Solar System

Comments

SUPERNOVAE FROM WD-WD DIRECT COLLISIONS

Image: Supernova remnant N 63A. Credit: NASA/ESA/HEIC and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Models for supernovae (SNe) related to thermonuclear explosions of white dwarfs (WDs) have been extensively studied over the last few decades, mostly focusing on single degenerate (accretion of material of a WD) and double degenerate (WD-WD merger) scenarios.

Atmospheric Beacons Guide NASA Scientists in Search for Life

Beacons of life could help researchers identify potentially habitable worlds. Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Mary Pat Hrybyk Some exoplanets shine brighter than others in the search for life beyond the solar system. New NASA research proposes a novel approach to sniffing out exoplanet atmospheres. It takes advantage of frequent stellar storms — which hurl huge clouds of stellar material and radiation into space — from cool, young dwarf stars to highlight signs of habitable exoplanets. Traditionally, researchers have sought potential biosignatures as ways of identifying inhabited worlds: byproducts from life as we know it such as oxygen or methane that over time accumulate in the atmosphere to detectable amounts. But with current technology, according to Vladimir Airapetian, lead author of a Nature Scientific Reports study published on Nov. 2, 2017, identifying these gases on distant terrestrial exoplanets is time-consuming, requiring days of observation time. The ne...

Scientists detect comets outside our solar system

An artist’s conception of a view from within the Exocomet system KIC 3542116. Credit: Danielle Futselaar Team of professional and citizen scientists identifies tails of comets streaking past a distant star Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office Scientists from MIT and other institutions, working closely with amateur astronomers, have spotted the dusty tails of six exocomets — comets outside our solar system — orbiting a faint star 800 light years from Earth. These cosmic balls of ice and dust, which were about the size of Halley’s Comet and traveled about 100,000 miles per hour before they ultimately vaporized, are some of the smallest objects yet found outside our own solar system. The discovery marks the first time that an object as small as a comet has been detected using transit photometry, a technique by which astronomers observe a star’s light for telltale dips in intensity. Such dips signal potential transits, or crossings of planets or other objects in front of a star, ...

SpaceTime

Search This Blog